Todo el mundo es complice de lo que ha pasado en Mexico, porque la estructura, las matanzas, y los genocidios de las comunidades indigenas son una caracteristica de toda la America Latina: de Brasil, de Peru... El mundo es un inmenso Chiapas... Nosotros, los de fuera, tenemos una responsabilidad, y unos mas y otros menos la estamos cumpliendo, pero son ellos los que deben hacerse la pregunta de que esta pasando. Es necesario crear una opinion publica que diga que esto tiene que cambiar.

Everyone is an accomplice in what has happened in Mexico, because the structure, the killings and the genocides of the indigenous communities are characteristic of all of Latin America: Brasil, Peru... The world is an immense Chiapas. We, those of us from the outside, have a responsibility, and some more than others are fulfilling it, but it is up to them (the Latinos) to ask themselves what is happening. It is necessary to create a public opinion that the situation must change. --- Jose Saramago, Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature

In Mexico, like it or not, American tourists are seigneurs, and in relative terms always ultra-wealthy. The vassals and serfs who pay them homage are the poor Mexican street hawkers and golfillos, or street urchins. I'd been fooling myself as Herr Photographer until a magazine editor brought this to my attention.

In the poorer cities of Mexico, not Monterey or Pachuco, but rather Acapulco and Oaxaca, for example, the children are especially present in the streets. In the zocalo(town square) in Oaxaca, they are omnipresent. As a photographer, something captivates me, something in their faces quite absent in their American counterparts. Where I live in Massachusetts, the children are conspicuously absent from neighborhood streets, corralled instead behind the steel-linked fences of school playgrounds. Peer through those fences and people will take you for a pedophile. Try taking photos and you'll be arrested.

At first, it was mainframes, big mainframes without names. The really big mainframes had numbers, not names. It was not the IBM Numberbeater, Small-Size. No, it was the IBM 370-145. It had a resident engineer to keep it running because it was forever breaking - I mean, "faulting."

The early frontpanels had arrays of switches and lights for operating the machine. Imagine our surprise the first day they brought in a monitor (a CRT ---cathode ray tube --- with attached keyboard) - no, they brought in two of them, because they were so unreliable one was forever being fixed, waiting for parts, etc. The peons (and professors) used punched cards, thousands and millions of eighty-column Holerith cards with the notched corner.

We learned COBOL, FORTRAN, enough Assembler to fix weak spots in the other two compilers. Specialists added a few more narrowly applicable languages, such as ALGOL (I never met an ALGOL user, but the Computer Center was forever putting out announcements like: "Patch 91 for ALGOL rev 2.12a in its mapped version has been installed again. Please pardon the delay in getting a clean compile last week, because we mistakenly installed Patch 91 for its unmapped version.") Adventuresome folks were learning PL/1 - there you had the "F" compiler, the "L" compiler and the wondrous "X" (or Optimizing) compiler.

We were told to solve problems. We did. We solved accounting problems, processing problems, identification and location problems, library circulation problems, all kinds of problems. Some of the accounting software written at that time, in COBOL, runs today in its Nth version or iteration. No one has looked at the source code for years - if it still exists.